


Those Cooler Shades of Love

by SylvanWitch



Series: In the Ruins [8]
Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: AU post-OotP, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 14:31:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The loose ends are tied.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Those Cooler Shades of Love

**Author's Note:**

> This series was my first fanfiction endeavor, posted originally at RestrictedSection.org in 2004. The title of this chapter is taken from Robert Herrick's "Corinna's Going A-Maying."

In the ruins, twin shadows moved, cautious but confident even in the midst of such devastation. There had been long days of excavation, of heart-wrenching retrieval in the rare Yule sun, which seemed to mock them in their task even while it offered the comfort of a Spring to come. Now, with the full moon glinting off the field of headstones planted on the remaining lawn of Hogwarts like hardened tears of the moon, bone-white in the brilliant lunar light, it seemed too much to hope that there might be green where now there was only white: snow, stones, and icy breath. 

Still, it was enough that the two shadows could move across the moon-bright ruins and seek refuge and comfort in the familiar dungeons, salvaged by the egregious hubris of one blonde-haired boy and the quick cunning of the man who ruled the Slytherin realm, Severus Snape himself. They skirted the still-unstable wreckage of the Library, Black wrinkling his sensitive nose against the neck-ruffling scent of burnt leather and the lingering odor of dead flesh, and came to the stairs down to the dungeons, Snape leading with sure strides borne of long familiarity with his route, Black following more carefully, eyes on Snape's retreating back.

Reaching the Potions Master's private chambers, which had been spared the worst of the devastation, they entered, Snape commanding light to the candles in sconces along the walls and heat to every fire in the place. "Mmmmm," Black purred, shedding his outer robes gratefully and drawing close to the blazing hearth in the study. Snape handed him a spell-warmed brandy without a word and seated himself in his velvet chair, crossing one long leg elegantly over the other and holding the wide bowl of the brandy snifter with both hands, inhaling in long draughts the heady essence of the spirit. He silently agreed with Black's assessment: Mmmmm, indeed. 

Black turned from the fire and made as if to sit in the matching chair to Snape's right, changing course at the last moment to sprawl lazily at Snape's feet, facing the fire, head propped up on one crooked hand, brandy in the other rolled slowly about the crystal bowl, casting warm brown shadows across Black's face. 

"Comfortable?" Snape asked, wryly but with no real venom.

"Mmmmm," Black replied.

"You seem particularly nonverbal this evening," Snape observed, amusement and something darker, sensual and primitive in his deep purr. 

"Yesss," Sirius replied, drawing the final sibilant out on a long sigh, as though he were encouraging a lover and not answering a simple question. He set the brandy carefully aside and rolled onto his back, stretching his arms above his head, arching his back, and baring his throat in a single, sensual movement that stole the breath from Snape's lungs.

"Stop that," Snape said, gravity warring with desire in his voice, lust betrayed by a certain breathiness. "There are things that we should discuss."

"Such as?" Black asked, coyly. He knew very well what they needed to discuss.

"Tomorrow—" he started, but Black stopped him, rising to his knees, parting Snape's crossed legs, and insinuating himself between his lover's thighs. 

"Tomorrow will come soon enough. I'd rather talk about tonight." Suggestion oozed from every syllable as Black's tongue snaked out to ghost over his lips, a pink promise of pleasure.

"I would think that there is very little left for us to say about tonight," Snape observed. 

"Oh, I don't know. What about, 'Come to bed, lover' or 'Yes, yes, right there, Gods yes!' or 'I love you, Severus Snape.'" 

Black stilled utterly, not daring to breathe for fear of spooking the Potions Master, who seemed to have been cut suddenly from the same slab of alabaster as the animagus between his thighs. Sirius looked into Snape's dark eyes, willing passion there, or frustration, even anger, anything but the calm blankness that occupied them now. Moments passed, in which Black heard the crackling of the fire as though at a great distance; the heat certainly wasn't reaching him where he knelt, chilled to the bone and fighting a shiver, ruthlessly exposed to the cold seeping from Snape's look.

Finally, the beloved voice stroked a line of frost down Black's back, beginning with, "You must persist in hoping for more than you have any right to expect, musn't you?"

Though Snape's words curled his heart into a tight ball at the back of his throat, Black struggled to answer evenly. "I don't expect anything of you, Snape." 

"Is that so?" Incredulity and expectation balanced there, two weights warring for words.

Black looked at Snape directly, a fierce gleam in his steady eyes, which were fixed with absolute focus on Snape's hooded gaze. There would be no question later about the animagus' meaning. "Love does not require a return, Severus. It does not demand nor obligate; it simply is. I love you, Severus, but I do not ask that you love me in return. Throw me out of here now, tonight, if you must, but know that I will love you regardless. I will not be deterred by your fear."

Snape's eyes were twin, angry fires built from the kindling of distrust, fed by memories of failure and betrayal, and tended even by the hands of the man kneeling before him. "If I fear," and his tone suggested that no such thing could ever be so, "It is because I have learned through long experience that love is for fools and liars. It is nothing but a pretty word used by pretty men to get what they want, and it is as easily recanted as an oath of loyalty or the implied promise of long acquaintance. Surely Minerva McGonagall has taught you that, if nothing else." 

Black's own eyes were angry now, furious with indignation. "You dare to compare me to that VIPER? Do you honestly believe me capable of that level of deceit? Do you think that I have harbored secret grievances and nursed them in my heart until they have blackened even the most innocent exchange with suspicion and envy and malice? Gods, Snape, you cannot believe that of me. You cannot!"

In a voice like the rasp of a diary's turned page, Snape said, "Was it not your suspicion, envy, and malice that brought me to you in the Shrieking Shack the first time? And did they not lie with us in that bed, rut with us in the filthy darkness the second time we came to be there? Can you believe that I have forgotten your treachery, Black?"

Sirius was stunned speechless by the pain in Snape's voice, a pain that seemed to darken the air around them and rob it of life. He looked away from Snape's eyes, which held not the righteous fire of anger but seemed instead to be collecting the flames and narrowing them to slender tendrils of light spilling down his face.

"Oh, Severus," Black whispered, undone by guilt and sorrow and a suffocating fear that this was the end, that the Potions Master would wearily dismiss him and demand that he never return. "Please, Severus. Please. Please..." his voice falling off to a hoarse mantra of supplication. "Forgive me. Please forgive me. Gods, I was a stupid, useless, jealous boy, Severus! I make no excuses for my conduct, but you must know that I am so very sorry for what I did to you. You must know how I love you, Severus, that I would never again betray you. Look at where we are now, Severus—in the ruins of the past, in the very epicenter of the destruction of all that we once believed infallible and indestructible and right. This is another lesson we can learn from McGonagall, Severus: not to take for granted what is merely because of what once was. Gods, Severus, I love you. I love you. I love you." And Black laid his cheek in Snape's lap, just at the juncture of hip and thigh, and placed his hands one on either side of Snape's slender waist—not quite embracing, but begging the right to embrace. 

An eternity passed, made up of counted breaths, and then a hand smoothed over his hair and across his face, and Black shuddered and turned into Snape's thigh and gave a sob of penitence and relief, raising his eyes to look at Snape only after the Potions Master tugged on his hair. 

"I will say this only once and then we are done with it. I will forgive you for your youthful indiscretion, but if you ever give me cause to believe you have betrayed me, there will be no pleading for forgiveness, no third chance. My store of mercy is sparse, and you have used nearly the last of it."

Black nodded almost formally, said "Thank you," though almost inaudibly, and bowed his head once more to his lover's lap. Snape's fingers began to card gently through the silken midnight of Black's hair, and they stayed like that, murmuring soft words of love and hope and desire, until the shadows crept from the dimming fire to envelope them in promising dark. 

*****

The Inquiry was a farce, overseen by a hastily assembled Wizengamot of wizards and witches largely culled from populations whose lives had been saved by Snape and the other Survivors. Testimony was stilted at best, at worst downright non-elucidative and was punctuated by several tight-lipped witnesses who swore upon Merlin's wand and the Great Grimoire itself that Bellatrix Lestrange had been killed at the height of the battle between Severus Snape and the Death Eaters. The only witness who suggested otherwise, Cornelius Fudge, had the disconcerting habit of breaking into hysterical laughter at the most inappropriate moments. Apparently, the strain of captivity had caused him to lose his mind, and he could barely remember anyone's name, much less what had occurred on the fateful day that had been dubbed "VV Day" by every journalist in the wizarding world. Though Fudge's initial insistence that Snape was a murderer seemed to survive the event that had otherwise obliterated the former Minister's grasp on reality and had, in fact, initiated the current inquiry, the Wizengamot disregarded Fudge's testimony, voting overwhelmingly in favor of justifiable homicide in the heat of battle, and thanked Severus Snape, newly appointed Minister of Magic, for his patience even while apologizing for taking up his time. "We know how busy you are," one young witch had simpered, clearly infatuated. As he was led out of the room by two attendants from St. Mungo's, Fudge seemed to be saying "salt" over and over again between bouts of creepy cackling.

*****

As Minister of Magic, Snape ordered the banishment of the Dementors, who had been kept in reserve by Voldemort as a standing army to be used against the wizarding communities on the Continent and as a terrorist tool for taming the Muggles. They were being sent to a magically protected island in the North Atlantic, from which it would be impossible for them to escape. When some soft-hearted wizard had suggested that the Dementors might well starve if they had no one's joy to feed from, Snape had merely raised on eyebrow expressively, as if to suggest that the questioner himself might like to volunteer for that duty, and effectively silenced the only opposition to the plan.

Snape also ordered the requisite inquiries into the deaths of Albus Dumbledore, Nymphadora Tonks, and Minerva McGonagall. 

Dumbledore's supreme sacrifice was trumpeted through the wizarding world, and the deceased Headmaster of Hogwarts became the Savior overnight. He was the first to be buried in the graveyard at Hogwarts, in ground consecrated by the Survivors themselves, who held a private memorial service to bury the bloodstone, wrapped in its green leather pouch, both of which had survived the immolation that had destroyed every vestige of the wielder himself. Sirius and Harry concurred that Dumbledore had been drawn up onto the dais by the stone, pulsing in his outstretched hand. Both Snape and Luna, in their capacities as "experts" on the Gift, suggested that the Ogham Few Straif, meaning coercion through force, had, in fact, applied to the bearer of the weapon and not the power the weapon held over the enemy, as they had originally believed. "Albus Dumbledore bore the stone knowing what it would do. The last thing that he said to me before we left Muggle House [so dubbed by the Daily Prophet, as though it were a resort or a tourist attraction, which it doubtless would be by season's start] was 'You must carry on where I have ended.'" Snape's voice had wavered, then strengthened. "He knew what price the Gift would ask, and he went into battle willingly." The Inquiry had ended then, as everyone but Snape himself was reduced to weeping and maudlin recollection.

Tonks was awarded a posthumous Order of Merlin for her bravery in battle and given an Auror's burial beneath the newly restored Atrium floor in the Ministry of Magic. A plaque bearing her name, rank, and Auror identification number was set into the floor and enchanted to ring whenever someone walked over it. "Tonks would have liked that," Sirius noted privately to Harry. "It's bound to scare Hades out of anyone who doesn't know that it's there!"

In the matter of Minerva McGonagall, the TRAITOR [always rendered in all capital letters by the wizarding press], Harry Potter testified that he had been on his way out to the quidditch pitch for an early morning solo practice when he had seen Minerva McGonagall flitting secretively around Hagrid's cabin and out towards the Forbidden Forest. On a whim, Harry had mounted his broom and followed her, catching sight of Hagrid and Dumbledore only moments later, moving just within the confines of the Forest along its verge. McGonagall had appeared to be following them but taking great care not to be seen. Intrigued and troubled, Harry had left his broom at Hagrid's and followed on foot. He had gotten only a quarter of a league into the forest when he'd heard the explosions at Hogwarts. Expecting McGonagall to return to the school on the path that they had taken, he had moved up the path to join her, only to see her raising her wand and aiming it at Dumbledore and Hagrid, who were just visible through the sparse winter undergrowth, perhaps forty meters ahead on the same trail. On instinct, Harry had muttered, "Expelliarmus," taking her wand. When she came at him, hands clawed and face wild, he had stupefied her, thinking that she must be cursed. By then, Harry had lost sight of Hagrid and the Headmaster, and he did not want to leave McGonagall there, wandless and defenseless in the cold. He had levitated her stupefied body deeper into the Forest until he could come up with a plan of action. That's when he'd seen the Death Eaters, swarming out of Hogwarts and onto the wide lawn in a loose battle line, firing curses at those unhappy few who managed to stumble, stunned and bleeding, from the warped and smoking doors of the school. He'd seen a contingent of perhaps two dozen break off from the main group and head toward Hagrid's cabin and the Forest beyond and had begun to retreat. From then on, it had been a game of cat and mouse. The first time McGonagall regained her faculties, she had attempted to brain Harry with a rock. He had bound her and asked her questions, hoping to figure out how to reverse the curse that she was clearly under. Sadly, with dawning disbelief and rising disgust, Harry realized that she was not functioning under the influence of any magical curse. "No, she was entirely aware of her actions. She was so hateful. She claimed that she had been overlooked for honors, that she should have been Headmistress years ago, that the Dark Lord had promised her untold power and that he treated her the way she deserved to be treated." Harry shuddered in his place, coughed dryly. Someone produced a glass of water and he mumbled a thank you before drinking deeply. "She kept going on and on about how much she hated Dumbledore, what a fool he was and things like that. She bragged about how easy it was to lower the anti-apparation wards, how trusting Dumbledore was. 'He never changed the passwords,'" Harry mimicked, in a chilling impersonation. "I finally gagged her with a robe sleeve," he said, shrugging. A murmur of approval wafted through the courtroom like a gentle wave. "Anyway, you know the rest." The Chief Interrogator, Arthur Weasley, said, "Yes, Harry, that's quite enough." The compassion in his voice brought tears to the boy's eyes, and he hastily fled the questioning seat to return to Sirius, who hugged him fiercely to his side.

The TRAITOR was cremated, her ashes buried in an unmarked grave on unhallowed ground in an undisclosed location. "That's liable to give rise to nothing but rumors and foolish legends," Snape had groused. He'd been all for having her body permanently preserved and placed on display at the Ministry as an object lesson to the power-hungry or easily forgetful, but less sadistic minds had prevailed on that count. 

The rebuilding of Hogwarts was a very different matter from the comparatively simple process of sorting out "what really happened" during the eight days in which the wizarding world had been held hostage to its darkest fears. Snape had no expertise in salvage or construction, so he chose the wisest course of action, which was to delegate that responsibility to his new Secretary of Reconstruction, Percy Weasley, whose organizational skills, combined with having lived in the "wretched hovel you call home, held together doubtless by magic, spit, and hope," seemed sure to make him the likeliest candidate for handling contractors. He posted the contracts in Hogsmeade and bidding began in a flurry of offer and counteroffer. 

The Diagon Alley Uprising had been a complete rout, the ragtag band of Resistance fighters taking the unsuspecting Death Eaters and Knockturn Alley traitors by surprise. When the last of their captors fell dead in the gutter, the joyous denizens of Diagon Alley lofted Bartholemew Jenkins onto their shoulders and paraded him down the street to the Leaky Cauldron for a "proper celebration." Once lubricated for the task, the rowdier element of the Alley's population proceeded to string the bodies of their enemies up from the lightposts, so that in the lengthening dusk the street became a macabre mockery of Yuletide decorations. Jenkins and Ollivander both retreated to their quiet shop to take inventory, and when the mob came to similarly outfit their lightpost, they drove them away with firm words and a few wandwaves. 

Molly Weasley had gathered her remaining flock, Bill and Charlie returning from their respective duties abroad to bury the dead, grieve, and rebuild the school they had once held dear. Molly and Hagrid were teamed up to care for the scores of orphaned children, charged with the critical responsibility of finding good homes for them. Molly opened the Burrow to six children, ranging in ages from seven to eleven, four boys and two girls, and Arthur smiled indulgently, knowing that those children would never be placed in another home. Though Fred, George, Ron, and Ginny, were never far from their thoughts and were utterly irreplaceable in Molly's heart, both Weasley parents needed the noise and distraction of a mob of happy urchins underfoot. Otherwise, their home seemed too large, too quiet.

The best psychosorcerers from around the world volunteered to act as counselors for those suffering from Distressing And Unavoidable Numinous Trauma Emerging from Deviltry (DAUNTED). Sirius prodded Snape to visit Cephalus Lightbringer, the greatest mind in contemporary Numinous Trauma Theory, but Snape responded with characteristic spleen: "If anyone needs his spirit examined, it would surely be you, Sirius. After all, I am not the one with a sudden craving to roll in something foul and then lick my own ballocks." Sirius had given him a measured and considering look, finally saying in a quiet voice, "No, you've chosen the much healthier route of dosing yourself to sleep with sleeping draughts and changing the sweated sheets every morning as though nothing untoward occurred in between."

It was a point of contention between them, though because it was founded on natural reticence on one side and genuine concern on the other, it did not foster acrimony as some arguments might. And as Severus was forever pointing out, voice weary with repetition, nightmares were the least of their worries.

*****

On Beltane morn, four and a half months after the Attack on Hogwarts, as it came to be known in the annals, Severus Snape stood on a levitating platform of beautifully polished stone salvaged from Gryffindor tower, and welcomed the mixed crowd of Ministry officials, victims' families, journalists, and gawkers to the Inaugural Ceremony for the Rebuilding of Hogwarts. The last of the rubble had been removed or, if salvageable for reconstruction, cleansed of all magical energies and left in neatly stacked and labeled piles about the grounds, Percy's hand evident in every minute detail. Snape scorned ceremony, though he certainly understood its necessity from a political point of view, and Sirius kept reminding him that the families of the victims needed closure, a concept that Snape dismissed as "psychosorceral babble." Still, here he stood in the watery morning light, wreath on his head and red robes resplendent, as he announced that the rebuilding would begin on schedule and invited the gathered to take a spin around the memorial Maypole, whose bright red and white ribbons danced gaily in the gentle Spring breeze. 

After the applause died down and he had answered the requisite, though annoying, questions, Snape spelled the platform back to the ground and stepped down, moving away from the festivities just beginning in the memorial garden that had been planted to one side of the cemetery. Black stopped him with a hand on his arm, and Snape turned an inquiring look at the animagus. 

"Aren't you going to take a spin, Severus?" Black inquired lightly, teasing.

Snape just continued to gaze at Black, no discernible emotion on his closed face.

"You cannot expect to take a mate at tonight's Beltane Fire if you don't honor the Goddess first. And you are wearing the white-thorn," Black noted, voice shifting from playful to grave in a heartbeat.

Snape still said nothing, the muscles of his arm, still trapped in Black's grip, made of iron, unmalleable.

"I will not ask it," Black said, "You know that."

Finally, Snape relaxed, using Black's grip as a pivot to come fully face-to-face with his lover, who dropped his hand at the unexpected movement. Staring up into the depths of Snape's black eyes, Sirius experienced a moment of vertigo, as though he were falling up into the wells of darkness boring into him, leaving him strangely weightless and at the same time terribly heavy. He suddenly felt that there was a great deal more at stake than whether or not they danced the May dance this morning.

Snape's sonorous voice stroked over Sirius' skin, then, weakening his knees and adding to his feeling of displacement. Around him the air resonated with waves of dark desire: "Would you have me choose you, then? Chase you over the fire, out into the moon-bright fields? Would you have me take you there, in the tall grass, where we might be seen by anyone, where we would surely be heard, panting and moaning and screaming each other's names into the stillness, bodies rising and falling in time to the beat of the Beltane drums? Would you have me run these hands down your sweated body, pin your hips to the ground while I rode you? Would you have me cry your name out as I come, shouting into the darkness? Would you have me be your Lord this night?"

Sirius looked up at Snape, who had closed the little space between them. The sounds of people making merry around the Maypole behind them dimmed to a distant falling noise, as though of an ebbing seatide. He heard his own heart pounding like the harbinger of future drums and thought that he could see Severus' beating beneath his Beltane robes, which captured the weak morning sun and poured it over the Potions Master in streams of bleeding light, as though he wore his heart's blood on the outside, for all to see. 

"Always," was all Sirius managed, his throat tight with feeling and the urge to cry.

Silence, in which fate's distant needle plucked at the tapestry, dove beneath the fabric of their lives, and rose again, glinting into the air.

"Then it will be thus," Snape intoned, almost formally, as he lifted one long finger to tilt Black's chin upward, moving their lips a breath apart as he continued, "Always." And he plighted troth with a kiss.

Finis.


End file.
